by Brian Lumley
E-Branch staff and espers were busy all around the camp, stripping personal and Branch kit and equipment from the vehicles. A lot of the ‘gadgetry’ — the hardware in the Ops vehicle — was in reality common-or-garden stuff, computers and communications equipment on loan from the Australian Army along with the truck itself. Mobility would be the key word in any future war — the mobility of Ops Centres, that is, and war meaning any ‘conventional’ war between nations, not species — and all of the WACs, the Western Alliance Countries, used compatible equipment. But the software and such belonged to E-Branch. And just as Trask’s people had been thorough in cleaning up last night’s mess, now they were being thorough in removing every last trace of their work and presence here. For, as Trask had pointed out, covert organizations such as E-Branch couldn’t remain secret if too many people knew about them. And in the sort of war that he envisaged, the Branch’s secrecy would be of the utmost importance, indeed Cosmic.
‘On Sunside,’ Lardis said, ‘oh, not all that long ago, the Szgany fought the Wamphyri with whatever weapons were to hand. Here your weapons are far super— er, superior! And not only your guns, grenades, and flamethrowers. No, for it seems to me that you’re using trreir own tactics against them, too.’ ‘Eh?’ Jake queried, walking beside him. ‘Disguises, smokescreens, visual lies — like that vehicle there.
Beer? No such thing. A deadly weapons system! Or if not a weapon itself, a system capable of directing and controlling weapons. Ben has told me that in Earth’s past the vampires had a saying, that: “Longevity is synon— er, synonymous, yes? — with anon— er, anonym— er…”’
‘Anonymity/ said Jake, and knew it for a certainty, without knowing how he knew.
‘Yes!’ Lardis nodded his grizzled, bandaged head. ‘And in E-Branch they have another saying: that secrecy is synonymous — hah! — with survival. Pretty much the same, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Pretty much,’ said Jake. ‘But vampires are one thing and I’m another. And frankly, I’ve had it with all the secrecy. If I’m so important to the Branch, why can’t I be told about it?’
‘At first it was because you might be less — or other — than you seemed,’ Lardis told him. ‘Now it’s because you might be more. And also because you mightn’t like what you are — if you are. Confusing? Well, not only for you, believe me! Anyway, regardless of what Liz says, it’s not my job to tell you about you but about me and mine and the way things were, and the way they could be again by now, on Sunside/Starside.’
Around the camp, goodbyes were being said, hands shaken, the Australian contingent making ready to move out. Soon there would be just the Ops truck, with its array of worldwide communications devices, one jetcopter, and another on its way back from Carnarvon. The two choppers were transport for Branch personnel and SAS commanders; the Ops truck would stay until they were airborne, when it too would move out. In their next location, Trask’s team of espers and support staff would be on their own until their Aussie back-up teams caught up with them. Thus these farewells were temporary; the same parties would soon be meeting up again, next time on the far side of the continent.
This was something that puzzled Jake. ‘How come we don’t move as a complete unit? Trask has all the contacts; why can’t he order up one of those big military transport choppers? Better still, why doesn’t he just call on ahead and arrange for a new righting force to be waiting for us?’
‘He could probably do any or all of those things/ Lardis answered, ‘but how would it look if we all arrived together at our next camp? Wouldn’t you consider that indis — er, indisc — er, indiscreet, Jake? Remember, it’s no easy thing for a man or men to hide their intentions from the Wamphyri. Any event unusual enough to arouse the interest of ordinary citizens is bound to arouse theirs, too.’
‘Like a sudden influx of specialist troops?’ said Jake. ‘Indeed,’ said Lardis, with a nod. ‘And as for starting out fresh with a brand new platoon of soldiers… but doesn’t that go against the very first rule? The fewer people who know about us—’ ‘The longer we survive/ said Jake.
‘Hah!‘said Lardis. ‘Finally we make progress. And the problem with Mrs Miller becomes that much clearer, too.’
The first vehicles were pulling out now, and the Old Lidesci grunted his approval. ‘This I like/ he said. ‘It’s what the Traveller is all about: constant movement between one place and the next. On Sunside, we Szgany became Travellers to stay ahead of the Wamphyri; we rarely stood still for very long in any one place. But here? Here we are the hunters. We move to track them down, and then we kill the bastards! Oh, yes, I like it a lot.” He smacked his lips.
The pair had arrived at the place of last night’s campfire. The back-burner, stoves and oven were gone, but a steaming pot of coffee and a few paper cups had been left beside the trench. And as these very different men from entirely different worlds sat down on the last of the folding chairs, Jake said, ‘Lardis, why don’t you tell me about Sunside/Starside? I mean, all about Sunside/Starside, or as much as I can take in. For since that’s where all this seems to have started, maybe it’s my best starting place, too/
And Lardis said, ‘As you will. But I may as well tell you now, it still won’t answer your one big question/
‘I had a feeling it wouldn’t/ Jake grunted. ‘But tell me anyway/
And in a low growly voice, in words that strove valiantly to accommodate Jake’s language — and when they failed reverted to Lardis’s native Szgany, which the listener took in as best he could — the Old Lidesci complied…
‘As its name suggests, though in more senses than one, Sunside/ Starside is a divided world. On Sunside, a slow and benevolent sun spins out days to more than four times the length of Earth days. But it sits low in the sky and casts long shadows — the shadows of the barrier mountains — on Starside. And the gloom and the long nights of Starside must have been the greatest of aids in the evol — er, the evolution, yes, of the Wamphyri.
‘We don’t know how it started; it happened in a time lost to memory except in myths and legends, campfire stories carried down — and altered, of course — by word of mouth. But before the Wamphyri there was something of a young civilization, in a world much like this world, with oceans and mountains, islands and continents, and even seasons. And its peoples were setting out to explore it, just as your first sailors explored yours.
‘Then, an accident. Not of Man but of Nature. A white sun fell from the sky. Ben Trask will tell you it was some kind of “singularity”… but that is science, of which I know very little. Anyway, it bounced over the world like a flat stone skipping on water. In one place where it bounced, the impact caused its outer shell to break in pieces which fell to earth in such numbers they couldn’t be counted. According to Nathan Keogh — called Kiklu upon a time — the land there became hot; chemicals in the soil gathered into pools; acids ate the white sun’s metal skin into rust. Thus a “Great Red Waste” came into being, which today lies east of the barrier mountains.
‘But the core of the white sun made a final leap. Shrinking, it sped west and slightly north; and such was its lure or fascination — its incredible “gravity?” — that even as it fell to earth it drew up from the earth those mountains that formed the barrier range.
‘I’ve probably made light of this; it should be said that the entire planet was in shock, convulsion. Lightnings crashed, the earth shook and broke open, and oceans stood on end, hurling themselves upon the land. From a benign world, the planet was changed to a nightmare. Entire races were wiped out, vanishing forever in the tumult of earth and fire, wind and water. It can’t be known for a fact, but Trask’s science has created a model for such a disaster which calculates that ninety-five out of every hundred human beings on my homeworld were killed in that historic upheaval! The seasons were no more; even our world’s orbit around its sun was changed, again by the “gravity” of the white sun, which had not destroyed itself but come to rest in a crater on Starside. The barrier mountains reared where none had reared before
, and north of the mountains grim and pitiless lands of ice shone dark blue under writhing auroras. It was as if a hell had descended from the sky, and the Szgany — those of my race who remained — were its denizens.
‘But they weren’t its only denizens… ‘At first, there were no Wamphyri. But there were always other peoples. The Szgany had avoided other races; they deemed them strange and called them un-men. Among these others, survivors of a northern clan of troglodytes now settled in caverns in the lee of Starside. Un-men from warmer southern climes, secretive desert folk known as the Thyre, became inhabitants of the burning regions south of Sunside’s fertile green belt. It is even said that a race of cannibals — necromancers who tortured and ate the dead — existed and perhaps still exist in a remote far eastern country beyond the Great Red Waste, the mountains, and all other places known to the Szgany. Of these latter: I have never seen one, and do not wish to.
‘But all of this resettling, and all of the planet’s gradual recovery, took years and centuries and even millennia. Trask has said that it must have seemed like “an endless nuclear winter.”
Well, to the people of the time, I suppose it was. But it did end eventually. And then there were no seasons, or only the very smallest climatic changes; and the green belt close to the barrier mountains was the only land in all of Sunside that could support the Szgany tribes, who slowly but surely began to multiply and forage in the forests.
‘On Starside, where a great pass splits the mountainous divide, there in its crater resting-place at the fringe of the barren boulder plains the white sun sat like a blind eye deep in its socket, shining its white light up into the night like a beacon, or perhaps a warning? It was like… like a door, or a gateway to the unknown! For if a man should climb down to touch that blinding light… ah, be sure he would not come up again! And because it had brought hell to the Szgany, it became known as the Hell-Lands Gate, aye.
‘From then on, hunters and wanderers in the heights of the barrier mountains would look down on Starside and see the light of the Hell-Lands Gate, and they would curse it by their stars, and turn their faces away. And the faces of all the Szgany were turned away from Starside and its Gate.
‘But then, who would be interested in exploring Starside? What was Starside but barren and endless boulder plains reaching north, and towering stone pinnacles — stacks, or “buttes,” as Trask calls them — reaching thousands of feet into the sky, and to the north the frozen oceans, and beyond the oceans the Icelands with their eerie auroras? No fit habitation for men, my friend, where the sun shone only on the topmost spires, and the cold was a knife in your bones. I have been to the foot of one of those great fangs… that far but no further. And now, thanks to Harry and his sons, there are no aeries as such…
‘But it appears I’ve gone ahead of myself. Best if I slow down. I was speaking of the past, and this is how it was:
‘Came the vampires. Ask me how, I can only shake my head. Today, no man knows. None living, anyway. We know their spores were born in the swamps west of the farthest reach of the barrier mountains, and Nathan Keogh has spoken of similar swamps in the east. Very well then, that’s where they came from, but how did they get there? Ben Trask has a theory — his people, these E-Branch people, have theories for most things — which has it that they were released into my world’s skies out of the debris of the white sun: an alien life form from the stars. Perhaps it is so, but I am not a scientist.
‘Anyway, and however it was, they came. Legend has it that Shaitan was the first. Because he couldn’t bear the sun, he co-habited with trogs in the gloom of Starside caverns. But he was more like unto a man, and he wondered about the Szgany, of whom the trogs had told him. Finally, when he grew weary of the company and the blood of trogs, he came in the night into Sunside. And the curse of the vampire — Shaitan’s mark, his vices — was left on all the tribes of the Szgany for all time to come.
‘There’s that of Shaitan in all of us, and I think in all of your people, too, especially the espers — but mercifully it amounts to very little. Watered down by time and blood, we see it only in these rare talents that Ben Trask collects and uses against the forces of evil. In him it’s his ability to see the truth and therefore to recognize falseness; in Goodly it’s his visions of the future, and in me it’s my seer’s blood, warning me of dangers whose scent is blown on the air, felt in. running waters, and glimpsed in the leaping flame of fires or patterns in the dust. When all is not well, I feel it. And in you—
‘In you it is something else… ‘But once again I’ve strayed.
‘In Sunside Shaitan recruited thralls. But the sun was too strong for him and his; they retreated into Starside. And there he built the first aerie of the Wamphyri, in those great stacks out on the boulder plains.
‘And the Great Vampire begat other vampires out of Sunside women and even out of trogs, and he raided on Sunside for blood and plunder. And while the Wamphyri prospered, the Szgany suffered every conceivable torment.
‘Fortunately the Szgany had been nomadic, Travelling folk for long and long before the advent of the Wamphyri. Since land was their only possession, they had to beat the bounds to protect it and lay claim to ownership. And so they were rarely at rest. Just as well, for their mobility was their survival. They could run and they could breed and they could hide, but that was all. And at night the vampire would ride his flyers out of Starside to hunt and to “play” in Sunside’s darkened forests. And everything that the Szgany are today is built out of the incredible, the despicable depredations of the Wamphyri.
‘The Szgany learned to hide, not only their trembling bodies but their very thoughts. Why, eventually they even learned how to fight back! But that was a long time in the coming. And as evolution taught the Szgany its lessons of survival, so the vampire — by nature lazy — found it increasingly difficult to take his prey. And then, from time to time, vampire would turn upon vampire, and all Starside become a battle zone.
‘The wars of the WTamphyri, their bloodwars, were endless, and except when truces were called they were times of rejoicing for the Szgany clans. But gutted aeries would always need replenishing, and depleted larders filling, and fallen flyers and broken warrior creatures refashioning in their morbid masters’ vats of metamorphosis. And however long it took, the Wamphyri would return to Sunside, its pleasures and plunders.
‘The Szgany Lidesci were the fiercest fighters of all. I make no boast, though naturally I’m proud, but merely state a fact when I say that my fathers’ fathers — the forefathers of the Szgany Lidesci — were the first of the Travellers to lay traps for the Wamphyri, their lieutenants, thralls and creatures. We were staking, beheading, and burning those bastards a hundred years ago! Aye, even before The Dweller and Harry Hell-Lander took up our fight and showed those monsters what a real war looked like, the Lidescis had the respect of the Wamphyri… along with their hatred, of course.
‘I was Chief of the Szgany Lidesci when The Dweller came, and later Zekintha, and later still Jazz Simmons. And finally Harry Hell-Lander, called Dwellersire. But Harry and his sons, The Dweller and Nathan Keogh, they all moved as you move, Jake… between the spaces used by common men, along a route invisible. Nathan Keogh still does, but in Sunside, in my world, on the far side of space-time; or one of its far sides, at least. Which is Ben Trask speaking, you understand. Me? Hah! I don’t even know where space-time is!
‘Anyway, I was Chief when Harry and his boy fought their battle in The Dweller’s garden — their grand battle with the Wamphyri — and won! I couldn’t be there with them, more’s the pity, couldn’t stand alongside Zek, and Jazz Simmons, and the Lady Karen, too; no, for I had problems of my own and arrived too late. But with these very eyes I saw what they had done: how they’d used the science of another world, the Hell-Lands, and weird talents from… well, from beyond any lands of the living, to defeat the forces of Lord Shaithis of the Wamphyri and kick his backside into the Icelands.
‘We thought that was the end of it.
All of the aeries bar one, Karen’s, had been burned out, toppled, and brought crashing down onto the boulder plains. Why, the thunder of it — the shaking of the earth — had been felt in Sunside itself! Well, perhaps not as far away as that, but you get the idea. It had been awesome. And as I have said, we thought that was the end of it, that finally the Wamphyri were no more.
‘Most of my people thought so, anyway…
‘But I have a seer’s blood in me — perhaps even vampire blood… oh, it’s possible! — and I didn’t believe that the Wamphyri were no more. It simply didn’t smell right, it didn’t feel right, and for a time equal to four of your Earth years I couldn’t settle but watched and waited and held my breath. And from time to time I would climb up into the barrier mountains, through the high crags and passes, and down into The Dweller’s garden, all fallen into ruin, where I would sit alone to think it over… and to worry.
‘And not without good reason. One time when I went there, Harry came back. But he was changed. No, don’t ask my meaning;
he simply wasn’t the man I’d known. But I believe he was soil my friend. And the Necroscope had chosen a most opportune time to return to my world, for my seer’s blood had told me no lie: the Wamphyri were back in Sunside/Starside! Not only the last of them, but also the first.
‘Shaitan the Unborn himself, aye, come back like a plague that can never die…’
CHAPTER TWELVE The Rest Of Lardis’s Story
‘Shaitan the Fallen — Shaitan the Unborn, Shaitan himself— and his banished descendant, Lord Shaithis: the two of them back in Starside after four years of peace and quiet and nights without nightmares, back from the Icelands. They had flyers and warrior beasts, the makings of a small but deadly army. And Harry Hell-Lander… no longer himself. And his son The Dweller much less than himself, for he was a changeling creature. As for the Lady Karen: who could say what Karen would do or where her loyalties now lay, who for four long years had been alone and brooding in Karenstack, the last great aerie of the Wamphyri?
